Computer wants to boot from two operating systems

I recently reformatted my hard drive on my Dell laptop. When I did that I deleted all partitions and created one new one. The install went well, except that when I boot the machine; It gives me a choice of two Windows XP operating systems to choose from. One of the systems does not exist and the other is the working op. I know there is a way to delete one of the choices, but I have forgotten how to do this. Can someone help??

See How to edit the Boot.ini file in Windows XP.

Thanks for the try, but the message shows up only on the post screen, The boot.ini file only lists one operating system

ED

Please post the EXACT message you are getting during post.

[Moderator]

Hint: You can hit the pause/break key to stop the boot process on that screen...

If you post the entire contents of the "c:\boot.ini" file, you might convince me there is only one operating system listed there.  To the best of my knowledge, the system determines which operating systems exist (and how many) by reading the boot.ini file.

If you post the entire contents of the "c:\boot.ini" file, you might convince me there is only one operating system listed there.  To the best of my knowledge, the system determines which operating systems exist (and how many) by reading the boot.ini file.

Not necessarily.  Vista doesn't use boot.ini at all.  And boot managers can exist in other things.  NIC's have boot managers, even the Windows installation cd has a boot menu built in.  But as was requested, we'll need to get more exact details before we can guess what's going on.

[Moderator]

But he stated 2 XP operating systems...nothing about Vista.
What does the install CD have to do with anything ? ?

My grandson finally fixed the problem. His solution: Right click on My Computer: click on properties; Click on the advanced tab: Click on startup and recovery: Click on the default operating system box and delete the one you don't want.

He makes me feel pretty stupid as he's only 13.

That's just a gui interface to the Boot.ini file we told you was the problem in the first place. If you click the EDIT button that appears on that screen you then see the boot.ini in a text editor.